It is believed that the students whose native language is one of the Slavic languages, find it easier to learn Polish as a foreign language than do the students whose language belongs to another language group. There’s a lot of truth in that. There is a „but“, however. The Slavs can easily fall into a trap called false friends when learning Polish.
IT SOUNDS THE SAME IN POLISH, SO...
There is a great deal of words that sound very similar or identical in Polish, Slovak, Czech and Russian. Unfortunately, similar sound doesn’t go with the same meaning. Every Pole doing the shopping in the Czech Republic or Slovakia must have been surprised when they saw bread described as „czerstwy“. At first you might think it’s the honest shop assistant telling his customers that the bread isn’t fresh. Wrong. The word „čerstvé” in Czech and Slovak means fresh, whereas in Polish it means old, stale.
MILITARY TENDENCIES IN THE POLISH LANGUAGE OR FALSE FRIENDS?
Russian speakers burst into laughter when they hear that Polish people drink from a ... cannon. And again, that is a lexical error: the word puszka (пушка) in Russian means «cannon», while in Polish it's just an innocent can.
Another thing that may astonish the Polish visiting their Slovak friends is the fact that they are invited to sit on the … carpet. But before we sit on the floor, on the above-mentioned carpet, we should realize that „divan” in Slovak is a sofa, not a carpet as the Polish „dywan” is :)
On the other hand, many Czechs staying in Poland must have felt the urge to return to the shop and complain about the pierogi (dumplings) they had bought as they turned out to be with jagody (blackberries) and not truskawki (strawberries) as it said on the packaging. In Czech and Slovak „jahoda” is the Polish ‘truskawka”, and „jagoda” in Polish means a sweet fruit that grows in the forest (our Southern neighbours call it „borówka”).
As you can see, although the Slavs find it easier to learn conjugations and declension, they might have trouble with false friends, therefore it is advisable that they have a dictionary at hand when doing a Polish course.
